Beyond the pleasure principle

T
he great thing about The Rattle Bag, the anthology which Seamus Heaney and
Ted Hughes put together fifteen years ago, was that it wasn’t much
interested in greatness. Resolutely indifferent to trends, movements and
inter-generational warmongering, it gathered chips of brilliance from all
times and all places, and “amassed itself like a cairn”. In organization, it
was neither thematic nor chronological nor even authorial, but simply “in
alphabetical order according to titles or first lines”, about as happily
random an arrangement as could ever be devised. Not the least of the virtues
of this structure, or non-structure, lay in the conjunctions, or
disjunctions, it produced. Here Sylvia Plath rubbed up against Christopher
Smart’s Cat Jeoffry; there an anonymous sung Cockney lament, for a baby gone
down the plughole, wedged itself between Larkin and Hardy. The guiding
principle was little more than the pleasure principle.
As its title gives fair warning, The School Bag is an altogether sterner
affair, “less of a carnival, more like a checklist”. A decade and a half
older and wiser than when they clowningly knocked together The Rattle Bag,
Hughes and Heaney are now much more conscious of their public
responsibilities. Back then, they could afford to cock a snook at the canon
by leaving out Herbert and Spenser, yet finding room for “Frankie and
Johnny”. Now they have cause for concern that the younger readers they are
pitching for are less familiar than a previous generation would have been
with the standard fare of Eng Lit.
Decanonization has made them canonical.
This time, the poems have been grouped in ways which, the editors hope,
“invite different kinds of historical and thematic reading”. The themes
aren’t stated but make themselves felt: Water, Journeys, Seasons, Animals,
War, Children, Madness, Cities, Wind and Death among them. Some obvious
transitions are made, Edgar’s line in King Lear, “Childe Roland to the dark
tower came”, cueing in Browning, Cowper’s tame hare passing on to Norman
Nicholson’s poem about Cowper’s tame hare. There are also more inspired
links: the proximity of Berryman’s “Dream Songs” to Edwin Arlington
Robinson’s “Miniver Cheevy”, for example; or finding Piers Plowman dropped
in among Whitman, Ginsberg and Olson.
The arrangement is never less than thought-provoking, but among the thoughts
provoked is that pedagogy, not entertainment, is the book’s prime motive.
Hughes even appends a kindly, schoolmasterly afterword giving advice on how to
memorize poems other than by rote.
Though nearly 100 pages longer, The School Bag has only 250 poems to The
Rattle Bag’s 450. This isn’t because of a larger typeface, or even because
the space between lines seems to have widened, but because the editors are
now inclined to poems that turn the page; they give us less of the lyric
flash and more of the epic sprawl. Among the longer works they represent, in
whole or in part, are Gray’s “Elegy”, “The Seafarer”, In Memoriam,
Fitzgerald’s The Rub iy t of Omar Khayy m, Pound’s first Canto, “Resolution
and Independence”, Spenser’s “Prothalamion”, “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner”, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Deserted Village, Pope’s “Epistle
to Dr Arbuthnot”, “Philip Sparrow”, Patrick Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger”,
“The Hollow Men”, “The Dream of the Rood”, Whitman’s “Song of Myself”,
Gawain and the Green Knight and “The Pardoner’s Tale”. For good measure,
there are extracts from King Lear and Marlowe’s Dr Faustus. The emphasis is
firmly “Back to Basics”.
Just as the structure of The School Bag departs from its predecessor, so does
its invention of and adherence to the rule “only one poem per poet”. Where
The Rattle Bag joyfully indulged its enthusiasms (multiple doses of Auden,
Blake, Hardy, Yeats, Lawrence, Emily Dickinson and Ogden Nash), The School
Bag is hemmed with fair-mindedness, allocating Herrick the same number of
titles as Donne, Graves the same as Laura Riding, and so on. A drawback of
this rule, since each writer has only a single shot, is to make you wonder
how adequately he or she has been represented: few worries, perhaps, about
Wyatt’s “They flee from me . . .” or Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not
stop for Death”, but is Johnson best served by “An Epitaph upon the
Celebrated Claudy Philips” or Auden by “Law like Love”? The only writers to
get round the once-only rule are, first, translators (Kuno Meyer and Joseph
P. Clancy appear many times) and, second, Anon, who, as in The Rattle Bag,
has a gratifyingly large share of the action.
Even Anon isn’t quite the poet he or she was fifteen years ago, however. Back
then, the politics of identity wasn’t an issue, and Anon wasn’t open to the
charge of Anglocentricity. Now the index is careful to distinguish plain
“Anonymous” from “Anonymous (Irish)”, “Anonymous (Old English)”, and
“Anonymous (Welsh)” - though at least it doesn’t stipulate “Anonymous
(Male)” and “(Female)”. Anon, it seems, isn’t quite so anonymous any more:
we’re made aware of where the poems came from and (via marginal square
brackets) of when they were written.
If the emergence of a nationalist consciousness (or conscience) in The School
Bag prompts nostalgia for the less frontier-minded The Rattle Bag, the
motive behind it is generously inclusive. “It is only in the relatively
recent past”, writes Seamus Heaney in his all-too-brief foreword, “that
there has been any developed awareness of the deep value and high potential
of the non-English poetries of Britain and Ireland, so it seemed to us that
some account of these basic elements would be both worthwhile and timely.”
Irish poems, in particular, are given a prominence surely unprecedented in
an anthology of this kind. There is no more eloquent argument for the policy
than Heaney’s own translations here of the eighteenth-century “The Yellow
Bittern” and Brian Merriman’s “The Midnight Court”, though Ell!s Dillon’s
version of the “Lament for Arthur O’Leary” runs him close. Even readers who
might grudgingly feel there are a dozen or so too many reports from Dark Age
Celtic fringes will be won over with a discovery such as “Pangur Ban”, an
eighth-century poem about a monk and his cat.
There are numerous other discoveries here, too, whether of poets rarely
anthologized in Britain (Thomas Bastard, Eve Langley, A. B. “Banjo”
Paterson, Rosemary Dobson, J. T. “Funny Paper” Smith) or of poets often
anthologized who, in this company, strike rich and surprising new notes
(George Barker, Edwin Morgan, Norman MacCaig). There are a few duds, William
McGonagall’s “The Tay Bridge Disaster” a half-intended one but Irving
Layton’s “Cat Dying in Autumn” surely not. More bizarrely, there are also
several repeats: since this is clearly meant as a companion volume, it’s a
bit unenterprising that Christopher Smart, Louis Simpson, William Stafford
and E. E. Cummings, to say nothing of Anon, should contribute poems that
have already appeared in The Rattle Bag.
Though their present interests shine through the collection, Heaney’s in the
preponderance of early-Irish texts, Hughes in the inclusion of Arthur
Golding’s stunning translation from Book Three of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the
editors, as poets, are careful to leave themselves out. Nor do they include
any poems by near contemporaries with whom they have been associated,
whether School of Belfast, neighbours at Faber or Tribe of Ted. So there is
no room this time round for Derek Walcott, for instance, and only a handful
of living poets are represented, Kathleen Raine, Anthony Hecht, Patricia
Beer and Richard Wilbur among them.
In this, as in much else about The School Bag, Heaney and Hughes seem almost
too scrupulous for their own good. Whereas in The Rattle Bag they could muck
about at the back of the class, here they are on their best,
smiling-public-man behaviour. The result is a rather earnest anthology, very
useful and instructive to have, but without the fun and fizz of old.
Blake Morrison’s As If was published earlier this year.